myths, folk tales, fairy tales, monkey tails

Irish Trees and Chema Tamales

Since my plant identification adventures have begun to account for trees I’ve been wildly frustrated. There’s a class at Umass where you have to be able to identify 50 trees during winter when they are without leaves. I’m having a hard enough time in summer with leaves, flowers, fruit. Oaks I have down.Well, there are many varieties of oak and I’m hard pressed to tell one from another and there are some that I would only know if I saw the acorns.

(Portuguese Oak leaves)

(pin oak)

(shingle oak)

But for the most part, I know an oak is an oak. And I love oaks. They’re stately, beautiful, the leaves have tannic acid and can be used, like grape leaves in pickling cucumbers to keep the skins firm.

I can often identify witch hazel, cherries, maples, sycamore, apple, crabapple, mulberry. Sassafras, okay, another favorite, I can almost always identify by its three different leaves, whole (no teeth), puppyishly green.

But this whole tree identification thing is complicated. If I try to recognize most trees by size, shape, bark color and markings, I’m lost. But I’m keeping at it.

Providentially, when I was looking for books on Irish mythology, I found a book called “Irish Trees: Myth, Legends and Folklore” by Niall Mac Coitir. What could be better, I thought, than mixing trees with stories. Maybe it would even help me with my identification. The first thing I learned, which fascinates me, is the fact that the old Irish alphabet Ogham is actually based on trees. Each letter is named after or symbolizes a tree. Ogham is in fact often referred to as the “Celtic Tree Alphabet.” Moreover, it seems quite possible that the alphabet is made up of stories — myth, legend and folklore created this alphabet and not the other way around.

Mac Coitr uses the alphabet to organize the book. For each tree she gives its letter (or, for each letter, its tree. Though there is at least one letterless tree, the Whitebeam – Sorbus aria.) She talks about the tree’s uses and importance in communities as well as folk beliefs and customs surrounding the trees and then goes on to myths and legends where applicable. I’m learning a lot but can’t retain a lot of the information because I don’t have the context. There is a ton of information in this book and sometimes I get pretty lost. I will have to do further reading and then go back.

Meanwhile I’ve been reading “Mayan Folktales: Folklore from Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.” I once lost my glasses on the bottom of Lake Atitlan (one of the deepest lakes in the world.) Fortunateley we weren’t at one of the deepest parts of the lake and the boat driver left me in the water (glassesless), took the boat to shore, got hold of a snorkel and goggles, brought the boat back (I was treading treading treading) and rescued them. Kind of miraculous. I bet not many people can say they lost their glasses and found their glasses on the bottom of Lake Atitlan. Then again, probably not many people fling their glasses mistakenly into the water while taking off their shirt.

The Mayan folktales are wonderful. Varied. In fact, some myths (creation myths) some fables, some folk tales. What I’m noticing in both the Irish and the Mayan stories is the Christian influences seeping in and also the struggle against Christianity overtaking their lore. Collective stories in some way comprise national and tribal identities and so it seems when the Christians came and colonized they either gave in to letting the people keep some of their stories, language, rituals the way Aaron gave in with the golden calf or they simply couldn’t erradicate the language and stories trying and all.

Anyway, there’s an interesting intermingling of Christian lore and culture in both the Mayan and the Irish. Trees, fairies and saints all coming together in Irish lore. In the Mayan, there are some tricksters who get away with the goods without having to turn into Christian-type do-gooders — but there are also stories that accept and emulate christian themes. And there are a few stories starring dirty rotten lascivious Catholic priests preying on innocent Mayan women.

Two of my favorite Mayan folk tales: “The Woman and the Guardian” about a wife cheating on her husband — it’s humor and sauciness is reminiscent of canterbury tales; and “Story of Chema Tamales” about a lucky hapless gambler who gets himself into a lot of trouble and always finds a tricky way out of it (in the last episode of his tale, he convinces a priest to keep a trapped dove in his hat (Chema’s hat) while Chema took the priest’s horses to get a cage. What actually lay in Chema’s hat? his shit. By the time the priest notices, his orses were long gone. The story with the best title would have to be “The Woman Who Loved Many Hombres and Died from Drinking a lot of Water and a Piece of Sausage that She Had Eaten.”

I also read an science essay that interestingly touches on the topic of stories and cultural identity and also the fact that there’s a lot of fact in ancient myths and legends (maybe as much as there is myth and legend in most facts.) I think that there’s no such thing as a pure story, a pure culture, a pure language. But I can definitely see how traditional stories of a culture that has been colonized for example transform to accomodate their new environments and stories from the other or colonizing cultures are subsumed and transformed as well.